Love is everything

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I suppose it shouldn't, but it surprises me that with the sheer number of songs that are written every year and come to our notice, so few contain a word or a string of words that cause one to pull up short and think, That's exactly the right way to put it or, I never saw it that way before. Oh, I know that's not what people are always looking for, or even ever -- how else to explain prog-rock? But it's what causes a song to get its hooks into my memory.

Having said that, if I were to make a playlist of songs I think worthwhile, they would all be selected on that criterion: that the words say something to me in a new way. And there would be thousands of them. There are an awful lot if you're listening for them, even though as I started out by saying, it's not much more than a drop in the ocean.

I'm busy compiling a post, which will be quite lengthy because filled with quotes, which illustrates this idea within the despised genre of country music, but that's for later. A good example of one that's just plain powerful is Love is Everything by Jane Siberry, a Canadian singer-songwriter who now apparently wants to be known as Issa. She's an intriguing character I'd never heard of, until she was chosen to provide two tracks for the kd lang covers album Hymns of the 49th Parallel, dedicated to Canadian artists. Only Leonard Cohen was as highly-rated, and one of his was Hallelujah, which everyone thinks is a Jeff Buckley number. But I digress.

The lyrics are below. The lines that caught my attention:

Love is everything they said it would be
Love made sweet and sad the same
But love forgot to make me too blind to see
You're chickening out aren't you?

The first line is probably the only occurence of that sentiment in popular music, where a singer looks back on a love and finds it good. The second line provides a reason why. But be careful, that line is a twin-edged blade. If sad is the same as sweet, then sweet is also sad. Doesn't that turn out to be the case? It does in hindsight, because any feeling looked back upon, even a sweet one, is now beyond us, lost and gone. The melancholy among us have learned to regard all emotions that way, not solely with hindsight. While the rousing slogan "This too shall pass" is never true for pain, it is always true for pleasure.

In the third line Issa, as she does in the first, takes a cliche and turns it into something else. Love is blind, we say, but love is not blind when it is ending. Any fool can see when, and pinpoint when, the point of no return is reached, even though we never admit it until it's much too late, and until we've lost not only the love we received, but also the love we gave, and all dignity and honour in the interim. There's at least half of the output of all popular musicians and songwriters that's an attempt to deny the obvious, the whole Come Back Baby school of lyrics. Melancholists reject that whole school of thought; acceptance is a large part of melancholy, and what distinguishes it from mere sadness. And this song rejects it, too: Love forgot to make me too blind to see.

There's more of that strain of naked truthfulness at the end of the song, when the lover is asked to look back and make a reckoning of how he/she loved. It's brutally truthful:

And find it in your heart to kneel down and say
I gave my love didn't I?
And I gave it big...sometimes
And I gave it in my own sweet time
I'm just leaving

Lyrics later, but first a performance by Jane Siberry herself, which is new to me. I can see why kd lang would be attracted to the song, which benefits, I'm sorry to say, from not being given the big torch production treatment kd brings to everything.




Here's the whole song:

Love is Everything
Jane Siberry

Maybe it was to learn how to love
Maybe it was to learn how to leave
Maybe it was for the games we played
Maybe it was to learn how to choose
Maybe it was to learn how to lose
Maybe it was for the love we made

Love is everything they said it would be
Love made sweet and sad the same
But love forgot to make me too blind to see
You're chickening out aren't you?
You're bangin' on the beach like an old tin drum
I cant wait 'til you make
The whole kingdom come
So I'm leaving

Maybe it was to learn how to fight
Maybe it was for the lesson in pride
Maybe it was the cowboys' ways
Maybe it was to learn not to lie
Maybe it was to learn how to cry
Maybe it was for the love we made

Love is everything they said it would be
Love did not hold back the reins
But love forgot to make me too blind to see
You're chickening out aren't you?
You're bangin' on the beach like an old tin drum
I cant wait 'til you make
The whole kingdom come
So I'm leaving

First he turns to you
Then he turns to her
So you try to hurt him back
But it breaks your body down
So you try to love bigger
Bigger still
But it...it's too late

So take a lesson from the strangeness you feel
And know you'll never be the same
And find it in your heart to kneel down and say
I gave my love didn't I?
And I gave it big...sometimes
And I gave it in my own sweet time
I'm just leaving

Love is everything...